If you value it, don't give it to John Reid

The government used Tony Blair's announcement yesterday to bury the bad news about the cost of identity cards. We expect nothing better from them.

John Reid had an article in the Guardian in which he claimed:

Our own, unique, identity is inexorably becoming our most precious possession.

I am not sure if that is true. I am not even sure that it means anything.

But if it meaningful and true, what follows from it?

Our houses and cars are also valuable possessions. Do we make those over to the state to look after for us? Do we bunnies.

I would be particularly unwilling to put anything in the hands of John Reid, because I find him morally disgusting.

When the Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny on this planet, Reid was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain - which, it has since turned out, really was funded from Moscow.

Remember: this was after the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and after knowledge of the Gulag became widespread in the West.

Well, we all make mistakes in our youth. But far from apologising for this, Reid treats it as though it makes him endearing. He is on record as saying: "I used to be a communist. I used to believe in Santa Claus."

He also describes his time at Stirling University in these terms:

Reid himself is more dismissive of neat labels, arguing that, in the skewed politics of the time, apart from the chess club, the Communist party was the only non-Trotskyite group on campus.

Well, I played chess for York University at the end of the 1970s, and our captain was a Trot. But I was a Liberal even then.